The Information Super Highway to Liberty

This is what my brother wrote to me this morning: “There is a difference between liberalism and leftism. The left likes to label itself as liberal, or even progressive, but it is not. It is a much more totalitarian mindset, and not particularly kind to its dissenters.”

I wonder if he might not be right.

David and I share a love of our dead father, golf and nostalgia, but we do not share political philosophies. As he put it himself: “I don't agree with the majority of your socio-political stances, and the role of government…But I will say this: there is a difference between liberalism and leftism.”

It was that last twist, the notion that the left and liberalism are different, that caught my attention. It reminded me of F.A. Hayek, the famous Austrian economist who, in the middle of totalitarianism’s worst hour, WWII, wrote The Road to Serfdom, in which he said that well-meaning but foolish socialists were, in entrusting so much to government planning and control, risking autocratic rule. Planners would want to plan, and as they tightened their planning processes and closed their ranks society would lose control of them. The totalitarian communism of the Soviet Union and China after Hayek published his book bore him out.

I’ve always thought that Hayek was writing about history, but I’ve learned from David and others that many believe he was writing about an eternal truth: central planning bureaucracies can’t—and mustn’t—be trusted. I say again: maybe they’re right.

There are so many big problems that look immune to any but governmental solutions—infrastructure, health care, poverty—that I tend to default to government as the remedy. My son Chris, who is a PhD candidate in Economics at Harvard, suggests I be skeptical of government intervention and welcome it only when no other solution is possible. Maybe he’s right too.

Chris and Meg and I were talking about my brother’s and Hayek’s views over breakfast and I asked Chris what viable alternatives to government action exist in the case of some of the important, large-scale roles it now plays. We talked about the spotty record to date of industry self-regulation, for instance, caused by obvious conflicts of interest. He suggested that our ability to get and share information more broadly in today’s high-tech world could make private regulation possible where it has not been before. Think Yelp instead of the FDA. That’s a gross exaggeration, but you get the idea.

Chris could be onto something revolutionary. We are on the cusp of a whole new world of data and data availability. As he put it: All of capitalism depends on market knowledge. I might add, as he suggested, that all effective and democratic government regulation depends on the same thing. Maybe information, and the means to quickly convey it, will be the bridge between those two great institutions: the free market and the government regulation that helps it behave, or at least not misbehave. It might also serve as a kind of vaccine against corruption in each.

Knowledge is power, the old saying goes. In Hayek’s time, few had it. Now many do. Might it not be possible, then, to achieve the lofty (Hayek said naive) aims of socialism using the power of capitalism yoked to broadly available data? And might it not be easier to trust both the government that Hayek feared and the capitalists that seem to have only their own interests at heart if we all had a clear idea of what each was doing? 

The libertarian in Hayek is in us all. The humanitarian in Marx in is in there too. Maybe now, aided by our new information technology, we can for the first time in history open up a real conversation between our competing instincts, one based on information rather than superstition, on understanding rather than fear.